Skip to content

CWL guide for Earth Observation

This is a guide for learning how to use the Common Workflow Language in the Earth Observation domain.

This guide provides a light introduction to:

  • The Common Workflow Language, an open standard for describing command-line tool based workflows
  • Containers as these provide a self-contained environment to run tools (e.g. GDAL, SNAP or OTB)
  • YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) a human-readable data-serialization language used to create CWL documents and their parameters file
  • SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) as a specification to abstract the EO acquisition's files (data or metadata) and ease the access to bands or manifests

This guide includes:

  • a set of tutorials for learning how to use CWL with Earth Observation.
  • a number of How-to guides showing how typical EO Earth Observation use cases are implemented with CWL
  • a reference section with pointers to the CWL open standards
  • a section with explanations of the concepts used.

This guide leads EO application developers to learn how to create OGC Application Packages using CWL and STAC according to OGC's Best Practices for Earth Observation Application Packages.